Re: Preferring text/plain over text/html?

[Mike Acar <mike@trolltech.com>]

Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu> wrote:
> On February 8, 2002 at 13:59, "Morse, Richard E." wrote:
> 
> > What if the text/plain message is merely a message saying "I'm
> > sorry, but this message cannot be displayed in you mailer.  The
> > actual message has been attached as an HTML message." -- This has
> > happened.
> 
> Live with it.
> 
> Seriously, this is extremely bad behavior of the MUA.  The sematics of
> multipart/alternative is to have each part be reasonable *alternatives*
> of each other.  With the example you provided, this is not the case.
[...]

Indeed. After a moment's more reflection (and reading Earl's mail) I've
realized that my reaction to this kind of message isn't just driven by
my arrogance and luddism but also by not particularly caring about
throwing away stuff generated by stupid, misbehaving software.

I realize that, in such a situation, there are lots of caveats which we
could discuss to death (the user doesn't realize it, he has an idiotic
admin who's set up the Exchange server this way, whatever) and that
merely telling the user to switch to a better MUA isn't necessarily all
that's needed.

On another note, Earl, thanks for MHonArc and for your quick answers on
this list. It's a very flexible and useful piece of software :)

-- 
Brilliance and gorgeousness                        |   Mike Acar
And we tell ourselves we don't want the treasures  |   mike@trolltech.com
But we hate the glass anyway                       |